Opening Day is always a time for big, optimistic thoughts. A time to declare that now, the present, is so much better than the past. Thing is, when you do that, you’re implicitly saying that what came before was inferior or flawed. And when you put names on the past, you’re trafficking in some level of personal criticism whether you intended to or not.
That’s where Evan Longoria seems to be in this article from the Tampa Tribune, in which he talks about how the team is all about clubhouse camaraderie and positive thinking and how everyone is on the same page with “The Rays Way.” Part of why that is now? Because a couple of old holdovers from the pre-2008 Rays -- the old Devil Rays --are gone:
He says Upton and Shields were fine players, and says that he’s not trying to be negative and that maybe he wasn’t putting it the right way, but jeez, it sounds a lot like a criticism.
Know what keeps one from making such criticisms, however inadvertently? Not treating a baseball season as a grand tale in which there are necessarily good guys, bad guys, new beginnings and all the rest. It seems here that rather than have any actual criticism of his former teammates, Longoria was simply trying to fit the Tampa Bay Rays into some narrative, however contrived. Sportswriters are bad for this. But it seems that players do it too.
